April 2009

April 22, 2009

Is suicide contagious? I'm afraid the answer is yes.In the last two weeks, the poet Deborah Digges and the painter Darragh Park joined David Foster Wallace and Tom Disch among the noteworthy writers and artists who have taken their own lives in the last year. In 2007 we lost Sarah Hannah, Liam Rector, and Landis Everson. There must be others. I write with full compassion for them and for the people they left behind. I've heard from a number of friends, off line and off the record, who are distressed by what seems to be an epidemic. They have asked me to address the question head on, as I haven't done in this space.We who teach have, I believe, a special responsibility to the young people who come to us for tutelage, support, and advice. We must do all we can to remove the false glamor that may enshroud an act of self-slaughter. Suicide is not romantic. Madness is not glamorous. The suffering that leads someone to jump off a bridge or take a lethal dose of poison is unbearably painful. There is nothing ennobling about the act. There is not even any guarantee that a violent death at one's own hands will amount to what W. H. Auden called, in his poem about Icarus, "an important failure." And let no one minimize the distress and damage that the premature death causes for the children, the parents, the families, the friends, the students and the teachers who will go on living albeit with a new burden of consciousness.There is a line in Paul Valery's great poem, "Le Cimetiere marin": Il faut tenter de vivre. It is not an easy line to translate. But it should be as well-known among us as the last line of Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." Rilke wrote: You must change your life. Valery: You must try to live.-- DL [April 22, 2009]

I teach on Tuesday and Thursday nights till 9:30 (and tonight, the students got so involved in their research projects, they actually lost track of the time--wonder of wonders!). It's a good day that ends with my having to tell students, "Well I'm not sleeping in the library tonight"; then, at home, being able to get the daily antibiotic pill down my sick cat's gullet before she's even noticed... It's a good night when living alone feels not merely ordinary, or lonesome, but like a playground where I can go on the swing set OR the slides, as often as I like.

Tonight I reveal my obsession with so-called minor languages: half-sunk-in-forgetfulness and half-reclaimed, languages that once occupied bodies and souls, kingdoms as well as the mouths of their speakers. --But I'm not going to begin with Yiddish immigrant poets whose dreams fueled my book, Recovering 'Yiddishland.' Instead (I promise) I'll end with them, when we get to Shabbes and I'm writing my last post here. Tonight--I'm thinking about Ireland; street signs and restaurant menus in Gaelic; and a book called Invoking Ireland: Ailiu Iath N-hErend (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2005) that I discovered when I was in Sligo (in Yeats country) two years ago. The author: John Moriarty, who (I just found out, online) died of cancer, just a few months after I stumbled upon his book.

First: the Ireland that I would invoke for you: which is a peculiar one, because the viewpoint is that of a Yidishe meydl, a Jewish "girl," whose grandparents lived in a language that was never permitted transmission into her--ears, mind, care. Assimilation, upward mobility (oh, and the destruction of East European Jewry, and the rise of Hebrew, fostered by Israel)--that and probably much more saw to it that Yiddish, her language, would falter and be largely "forgotten." So, on a university trip, with a non-Jewish colleague, and (of course: this is Kentucky!) ten non-Jewish students, she arrives in a Catholic country; a very Catholic country. --She arrives in a Celtic country. --She finds herself in a land where "holy wells" layer over "thin places," where chapel ruins are populated by fairies, and where Gaelic ("Irish") is the living repository of an indigenous people's past. In the Republic of Ireland, Gaelic is considered the equal of English and much effort is being dedicated to its restoration; it's a required language in the schools, and yes, public signage is bilingual and there are Gaelic TV shows as well as English. And in the Ghaeltacht, the West of Ireland, Gaelic has never gone out of use (despite English edicts and years of cultural suppression).

--And this Jewish-American/Yidishe meydl wonders again: what happened to my language, the language of school children and forests and superstitions (and New York City fire escapes, newspapers, tar beach, and crowded cafes?).

Which brings me to: John Moriarty's amazing, radical book, in which Ireland is revealed to be a land

I am so sorry that I learned that a D showed up on my transcript and I just wanted to explain that it happened

because I have monobecause I have the flubecause I have a learning disabilitybecause I have fibromyalgiabecause I have diabetesbecause I have an undiagnosed diseasebecause I ate chicken nuggets the night before the finalbecause I got sick after eating chicken nuggetsbecause I haven’t been taking my medsbecause I am depressedbecause my meds aren’t workingbecause I can’t concentrate anymorebecause my girlfriend left mebecause my girlfriend’s friends won’t talk to me nowbecause my girlfriend got pregnantbecause the baby diedbecause someone else I love died, toobecause I cried and criedbecause I am so far behindbecause I am slipping to the end of my ropebecause someone keeps setting off the alarm at 3AM in my dormbecause I know that someone who likes setting off fire alarmsbecause I wish the campus police could catch the someone and put him away for goodbecause the campus police don’t do their jobsbecause I am always tired these daysbecause my motivation is dwindlingbecause I can’t catch upbecause class is where I sleep now that I don’t sleepbecause I feel like Pavlov’s dogbecause I open my text book and fall asleepbecause I can’t do the homeworkbecause I didn’t come to class so I never got the assignmentbecause my computer broke so I didn’t get my assignmentsbecause I lost my syllabus and didn’t know we had any assignmentsbecause I have homework in my other classes, too, especially Russian historybecause the history professor punishes me if I’m late or don’t show up or turn in myhomeworkbecause I have a really strict Russian history professorbecause I have to study my history so much, I barely have any time left for physicsbecause I switched majors and now I don’t need your classbecause I want to be an intellectual, not a scientistbecause I know you are understandingbecause I won’t tell a soul if you change my grade to a Cbecause I have heard you are the nicest guybecause I loved your class even if I never showed up for itbecause I’d never forget you if you helped me out this one timebecause I need to believe relief is in sight

April 21, 2009

David Yezzi’s post a few days ago about Philip Larkin prompted this post by Jim Cummins, which prompted a comment string about Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid, a book I read and loved when it was published in 1982 (Grove). I was living in Albany, NY at the time and Coover came through to promote another book. When I asked him about Spanking, he told me that the book was really about “language.” I was confused, felt dumb.The book I read was about the S&M relationship between a man and his maid. Oh well.

Anyway, Jim Cummins hasn’t read the book, though he would like to, so I did a quick search to see if it is still in print.It most certainly is, yet with a different cover than the Coover I read and loved. Check this out. Here's the book (left) I read in '82.

Click below to see the current cover. (Warning: do not do this if you are in a public place.)

It's Tuesday, the semester's almost over, I have a cold, it's been raining a lot, and I am topic-less for this week's blog. So, what's up with you?

All I can offer you today is a poem, and I'm so out of sorts, I was having trouble finding one. Finally I came across this one by Jane Kenyon (I can't tell how many times my ass has been saved by a Jane Kenyon poem). Today I feel like the turtle in it - grumpy, unmoved, ancient and reptilian. Next week, I'll be my usual sunny and charming self. Until then, here's the poem:

"April Walk"

Evening came, and work was done.We went for a walk to seewhat winter had exactedfrom our swimming place on the pond.

The moss was immoderately green,and spongy underfoot; stepping on it seemeda breach of etiquette.We found our picnic tablesitting squarely in the bog -- onlya minor prank. The slender birches watched usleaning from the bank.

And where the river launches forthfrom the south end of the pondthe water coursed high and clearunder the little bridge.Huge, suspended by the surge, grand-father turtle moved sporadically one flat, prehistoric, clawed armat a time, keeping his head downstream.

Years ago, he made a vownot to be agitated by the runnelsof spring, the abundance of light,warm wind smelling of rain,or the peepers' throstling...

We watched till he was out of sightand seemed illusory, then turnedtoward home -- the windowsbrazen in the setting sun....

In 1985 James Schuyler and Darragh park commenced on the project of "accompanying journals," in Park's phrase, Schuyler's in prose and Park's in drawings. The journals were not "mutually descriptive," but did reflect conversations the two men had and thus constitute "not only in some way an account of our relationship but also evidence of some of the things which nourished our relationship." Of Park's cover for Two Diaries (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), Douglas Crase writes:<<This is the view out Jimmy Schuyler's window onto 23rd
Street--"a street that doesn't have much going for it," if I remember Jimmy's
description aright. The building with the egg-shaped medallion, directly
across, is the old Eastman Kodak building, designed by McKim, Meade, and White (they also did Eastman's house in Rochester).The street front has been
brutally remodeled but you can detect their classicizing in the upper
stories. Not too much, though; Eastman insisted on the economy
version. Darragh gave me this drawing and I have it in my studio here in
Pennsylvania so I can always share Jimmy's view -- this much at least.>>

Darragh Park did the cover for Bernard Welt's book of poems, Serenade, which Z Press published in
1979. Douglas Crase writes that the drawing is "surely the interior of [Darragh's] apartment, [in] 440
West 22nd Street, looking toward the windows that
face 22nd Street -- the
perspective, when much enlarged, which became his big Proustian painting '440'."

April 20, 2009

The flowers are fulsome now; the air, rinsed and rinsed again by rain, which has bucked across the sky all day. I like a cold, wet spring. That's probably one reason why I loved my time at Hawthornden, in Scotland, in a lushly chill and rainy season. (The other reason is the shortbread--but I digress).

Once, I woke in the black of my bedroom, fumbling for the bedside lamp--because I thought I'd felt someone's breath on my cheek. Most nights, after the other writing fellows had also tucked themselves away into their pocket-sized chambers, I simply read till I got too tired to keep my eyes open, and let the calls of owls carry me into a different century of sleep.

,,,The owlet's cryCame loud--and hark, again! loud as before.The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,Have left me to that solitude, which suitsAbstruser musings...

Since I got back, I've worked very little on the writing project that took me to that place. (You know: teaching trumps everything... ) But the place itself burbles up, wells up at moments when the smell or taste seems right.

Things you should know about Hawthornden ("International Retreat for Writers"):

--It really is a castle. (At least, from the outside.)

--There are Pictish caves under the castle, and you may visit them.

--William Drummond, a handsome man (judging from his portrait on the staircase landing), composed copious volumes of verse during his tenure as Hawthornden's owner and keeper. (Drummond died in 1649).

Of all his work, I have but two lines to share with you:

The world is full of horrors, falsehoods, slights:Wood's silent shades have only true delights.

April 19, 2009

Have you ever heard the broad, tender accent of an Appalachian-American? (Instead of pie, hear pah; instead of tired, hear tarred; instead of hollow, holler). Have you ever heard the ominous yet rather clinical term, "mountaintop removal?" What about the notion that the people who live in the mountain hollers of Eastern Kentucky don't live in the good ol' U.S.A., but the "United States of Appalachia," where King Coal is the ruthless leader?

--I'm writing to you from Louisville, KY, where last night 700,000 people gathered on the banks of the Ohio for "Thunder Over Louisville," an annual megaton fireworks-and-military-jets extravaganza that means the Kentucky Derby is only two weeks away. But rather than write about "Derby," as it's known here, or the attendant events (charitable or salacious), or the extreme hats that will adorn many a (predominately) blonde head, I am moved to share with you some other information (which will wend its way toward poetry eventually I swear).

On Friday evening I stood in a crowd at a mini-street festival (bluegrass, beer, tattooed arms and plenty of adorable children and dogs) -- called "Louisville Loves Mountains," and dedicated to arousing urban interest in an issue that feels extremely remote (despite being rooted in a part of the state only a five-hour's drive away). That issue is a method of coal mining currently practiced in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia that involves literally dynamiting away the tops of mountains. As you might imagine, there are a slew of environmental problems associated with the ensuing wreckage, but in addition, the residents of mountain hollers are threatened--physically, economically, and culturally--by the loss of their beloved mountains . I have lived in Kentucky for longer than I care to think (well, OK, almost nine years), in a strange diaspora, even here in Louisville--surrounded by friendly natives who are also some of the most cliquish people I've ever met, in a city that is a stubborn mix of small-town ("what high school did you go to?" is a common greeting) and worldly (think: Actors Theatre, Wendy Whelan, My Morning Jacket... ) Friday evening was the first time, possibly ever, that I felt an emotional connection to the state. (And I have only been to eastern Kentucky once!) --I felt it because, as I said, I stood in the crowd -- listening to the novelist Silas House read from his new (nonfiction) book, on mountaintop removal. He is an Appalachian native and in a voice that was sorghum-sweet, he described the efforts of a humble woman resident of Maysville, KY, whose heritage in the mountains goes deep, and who is determined to keep the coal company out of her holler.

It struck me that we in the crowd were taking part in an antique experience: we were getting the news, not from twitter, not from a blog, not from TV's 24-hour jabber, not even from newspapers (which are practically prehistoric, now): but from the mouth of someone who had witnessed some vital things, written them down and now delivered them to us, in language. His words (and his voice, his accent, the knowledge of his own cultural heritage) moved me.

The KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series

Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone

Presents . . .

Laura Sims & Matthew Rohrer

Monday, April 20 @ 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poems: Practice, Restraint, winner of the 2005
Fence Books Alberta Prize, and Stranger,
forthcoming from Fence Books in March of 2009. Her book reviews and essays have
appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of
Contemporary Fiction, and she has recently published poems in the journals Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, CAB/NET, and Crayon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at
Baruch College in Manhattan.

Matthew Rohrer
is the author of A Hummock in the
Malookas (which won the 1994 National Poetry Series Open Competition), Satellite, A Green Light (shortlisted
for the 2005 Griffin International Poetry Prize), and Rise Up. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks and recorded the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He's appeared on
NPR's All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing, has been awarded the Avery
Hopwood Prize for poetry and a Pushcart Prize, and has been widely
anthologized. A chapbook-length action/adventure poem They All Seemed Asleep was recently published by Octopus Books. He
teaches in the creative writing program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

Cherry blossoms filled the air, swept by the May wind, and a friend said, "Oh, I thought it was snowing." That, Darragh Park said, was the effect he tried to get across in his paintings. He wanted to convey the pink cascade before it gained definition as blossoms or snowflakes -- and to convey the friend's face at the same time.

Darragh, who died Friday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said he had "a vision of vision." As a motorcyclist he learned on entering a curve that he had to focus "beyond my immediate destination if I was to operate the machine smoothly and stay alive." He had to be able to divide his sight between two points and let "the rest of [his] vision" take in everything between them. The beauty of his paintings is a beauty achieved by the supremacy of vision. How cruel that of all ailments, he had to suffer the progressive deterioration of his eyesight.

Darragh did the cover of "An Alternative to Speech," my first book of poems: a wraparound black-and-white cityscape in the rain: the traffic, human and vehicular, on the corner of 25th Street and Ninth Avenue. Darragh was devoted to James Schuyler and did the covers for Schuyler's "Collected Poems" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and for "The Diary of James Schuyler" ed. by Nathan Kernan (Black Sparrow): both are portraits of the poet. Darragh must have done covers for other books, and I would be grateful for details from anyone who has them.

"Robin is one of the most varied of the poets on the Pitt
list in her style and subject matter -- and the foremost feminist poet of her
generation. If the word 'feminist' scares you, or calls up some cliché like ‘no
sense of humor,’ you should become acquainted with her work. And grow up."

—Ed Ochester

THE BATH

I like to watchyour breasts float like two birdsdrifting downstream; you like a book,a glass of wine on the lipof the porcelain tub,your music. It is your way of dissolvingthe day, merging the elements of your bodywith this body. The room fills with steamlike mist off a river—as intimate to imagine youpleasuring yourself: watery fingers, slowmovement into fantasy.You call me in and take my handin your wet hand. I have to shield my eyesfrom the great lightcoming off your body.When you ask me to touch youkneel by the water like a blind womanguided into the river by a friend

April 18, 2009

This week we welcome Merle Lyn Bachman as our guest blogger. Merle is the author of "Recovering 'Yiddishland: Threshold Moments in American Literature" (Syracuse 2008), a book of literary criticism, translations, and memoir; and Diorama with Fleeing Figures, a book of poems (Shearsman 2009). She is an assistant professor of English at Spalding University (Louisville, KY), where she also directs the BFA program in Creative Writing. Welcome, Merle.

If you happen to be in Louisville on Sunday, April 26, head over toCarmichael's Bookstore to hearMerle read from Diorama. 4:00 p.m. (2720 Frankfort Ave. (502) 896-6950)

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this weekput me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike".

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,Then. Every bodyI know and care for,And every bodyElse is goingTo die in a lonelinessI can't imagine and a painI don't know. We hadTo go on living. WeUntangled the net, we slitThe body of this fishOpen from the hinge of the tailTo a place beneath the chinI wish I could sing of.I would just as soon we letThe living go on living.An old poet whom we believe inSaid the same thing, and soWe paused among the dark cattails and prayedFor the muskrats,For the ripples below their tails,For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making under water,For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.We prayed for the game warden's blindness.We prayed for the road home.We ate the fish.There must be something very beautiful in my body,I am so happy.

-- James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling on the damp bricks, staring every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

I admit it - like millions of others across the globe, I have been mesmerized and moved by "Britain's Got Talent" contestant, Susan Boyle of Scotland. Round, completely unglamorous, and 47-going-on-48, Boyle has become a global sensation; her triumphant audition on the UK's version of the popular reality show has been seen on YouTube by tens of millions. No wonder. It is sweet to watch the snarky, superior, and manifestly unkind Simon Cowell dissolve into a puddle of goo as Boyle launches into "I Dreamed a Dream," as well as the other judges and the smirking audience shifting from disdain to awe in about three bars. (Especially sweet if you were ever the fat, pimply girl who had to walk by a table full of giggling, sneering popular kids in the high school cafeteria, or if you are - say it! - middle-aged and engaging in an unanticipated war with calories and gravity.) But, even with that initial satisfaction, this part of the audition clip loses its importance next to the power and beauty of Boyle's voice. Her soaring voice -- it is, as one of the judges says, a privilege to listen to.

Watching Boyle this week made me think of another singer who has a similar story, although she was a teenager when her career began. Ella Fitzgerald was an unlikely pop star. When she walked onto the stage at the Apollo Theater one Amateur Night in 1934, she was chunky, raw, poor, wearing a hand-me-down dress and men's shoes because they were the only decent pair she could find - a 17-year-old escapee from reform school with no money and no training. The audience jeered and catcalled until she began to sing the popular Connee Boswell song, "Judy." Like Boyle's audience, they switched instantly from derisive booing to rapt cheering, and applauded and hollered so much at the end of her performance that she had to sing an encore, "The Object of My Affections."

Benny Carter was playing saxophone in the band that evening, and he arranged for Ella to sing for the legendary drummer and band leader, Chick Webb . When Webb saw the shy, awkward, pudgy Fitzgerald, he reportedly turned to Carter and said something like, "You've got to be crazy! You want me to listen to that?!" But Carter insisted, and Webb too was enchanted. He took Ella under his wing (some reports say he adopted her, but this is apparently an exaggeration) and signed her to sing with his band. They produced such pop hits as "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" and "Love and Kisses." In 1939, Webb, who suffered from crippling spinal tuberculosis, died, and his musicians became "Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Band." The rest, as they say, is history.

I couldn't decide which of these two clips to post, so here are both of them. After all, there is no such thing as too much Ella.

April 17, 2009

David Yezzi's post and David Lehman's comment following bring up the basic issues all Larkin lovers (I don't think there ARE any Larkin haters, except maybe Czeslaw Milosz) mull over frequently. When you read Andrew Motion's biography you see what a controlling, often obnoxious personality he was; the compartmentalizing of his love/emotional life is particularly repellant. My favorite index to this side of his character is the spanking; he found spanking young girls very titillating and belonged to at least one circle of fellow spanking-lovers, the members (!) of which traded spanking magazines among themselves. Thus assuring a spanking good time was had by all! (I love the word 'spanking.' Perhaps I'm a closet spanker. Wanker, more likely.) And of course, as both Davids imply, this control-freak aspect permeates his work and career, along with his great erudition, love of jazz, amazing intelligence, and all the other qualities that blend to give us these fabulous poems which I personally have loved since I was fortunate enough to discover them.

But my story is only indirectly about this stuff; and it comes to me from Phil Levine, another great admirer of Larkin, who was visiting England with his wife, Franny--this would be sometime in the late 60s or early 70s--and who wangled an extraordinarily rare and precious appointment with Larkin for dinner. I don't have the details as to how this came about, but I know Phil relates it as an event that was so rare--a visiting American poet granted an audience with the Bath librarian--that he regarded it with awe and gratitude. He and Franny were tremendously excited and felt greatly privileged; they showed up at the restaurant and eagerly awaited the poet. Phil was particularly keen on talking to him about jazz: Artie Shaw, Coltrane. Phil was friends with guitarist Kenny Burrell in Detroit. Larkin was about a half hour late, or more; and when he showed up he was exceedingly shy. Conversation was imposingly difficult; and about 15 minutes into it, Larkin contrived to spill a pitcher--not a glass, a pitcher--of water all over his stomach and lap. He jumped up, made apologies about going to get towel--and never came back! Phil and Franny never saw him again.

I love this story for many reasons, not least of which is Levine's ingenuousness and enthusiasm, though the joke is on him: as he tells it, he's completely on Larkin's side. And of course it's a quick look into the personality of maybe the best British poet of the last half-century; certainly one of them.

Word has reached us that the painter Darragh Park has died. His body was discovered this morning in his Bridgehampton studio by a housekeeper. Park painted landscapes -- and city streets -- with the rigor of a Fairfield Porter and a lush palette all his own. In addition to paintings and drawings, he did the covers for several of James Schuyler's books of poems and was an incidental character in some of Schuyler's poems. His subjects included baseball games in Shea Stadium and seascapes in Miami Beach. The combination of purple and green on the cover of "A Few Days" creates a sensual visual excitement that seems true to nature's own talent for setting purple loosestrife and yellow grass and weeds in front of oaks and maples in their green summer glory. His death is a great loss.-- DL